1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a technology of processing parameters for adjusting a visual effect on still image data and an effect on a sound.
2. Background Arts
This type of technology is exemplified such as a filtering process and an effect process on image data and sound data. Herein, the filtering process connotes a process of filtering, such as smoothing, etc., the still image data and the sound data.
Further, the effect process connotes a process of setting parameters, such as brightness of the image, a contrast thereof, a color, etc., for designating visual effects on the image data. Moreover, the effect process on the sound is exemplified such as a process of adjusting a reverberation effect, and so on.
Hereinafter, the effect process includes the filtering process given above and implies a general category of process of processing the image and the sound in accordance with the parameters. The present invention relates to a user interface (UI) in a system for setting the parameters described above.
According to the prior arts, when executing the effect process on the still image, to start with, the parameter is designated. Then, for confirming a post-processing result, the image is previewed in many cases.
In the effect process, etc., a content of the image as a result of processing differs depending on a value of the parameter. Setting such a parameter to a value desired by a user involves providing a numerical-value-based parameter designating function or scroll-control and sliderwise-control parameter setting functions. Then, it is a general practice that the parameter value is directly inputted, or the parameter is set under control while displaying a degree of the effect so as to be previewed. Herein, the control is defined as a component that can be laid out on the computer screen and provides the user interface.
The conventional parameter designating method was, however, hard to establish a compatibility between a highly-accurate designation and an intuitive input technique. The input of the numerical value has a characteristic of directly designating its value and is therefore capable of designating the highly-accurate parameter value.
If this value is incremented or decremented, however, it is required for confirming how much there is a change in the effect that the value be inputted each time, and the preview and the auditory trial be performed. As a result, these procedures make the user hard to intuitively grasp a relationship between the parameter value and the effect.
On the other hand, there is a method of intuitively designating the value by utilizing the scroll-control. According to this method, however, a visible width of the control itself indicates a range of the values.
Then, on the user interface screen that generally has a limited space, a sufficient control width can not be ensured. As a consequence, there occurs such a phenomenon that one unit of the operation in the scroll-control is equivalent to a unitage of several tens in value.
Accordingly, there might be a case where the highly-accurate input is difficult to perform under the control described above. Further, even if one unit of the control is coincident with a minimum unit in value, when scrolling by a dragging process using a pointing device, a minute shake in hand often makes it difficult to input with a high accuracy.
Moreover, there is also know a user interface that combines the value designation with the scroll-control. Even in the case of utilizing this type of user interface, it is a timing of inputting the value that there appears a variation in effect which depends on an increment and a decrement in value.
Therefore, when the operator increments or decrements the parameter value, there is needed a step of changing the value each time in order to confirm a visual effect and a sound effect. Such a manual input of the operator causes a scatter in timing of designating. It is therefore difficult to exactly conform a degree of transition of the effect in relation to a quantity of variation in value.